Booksmith is a personal, Kanban-coordinated publishing system for shaping base information into a book. It is shared as a working architecture for study and adaptation — not as a hosted service, an installable product, or a one-click writing tool.
Developed and used as a personal publishing workflow, including two books published on Amazon.
You give it base information — whatever source material a project actually has: research, notes, outlines, source documents, transcripts, fragments, a transcribed idea sheet. It plans a book from that material, stops for your approval, then drafts, reviews, and assembles a manuscript.
Every phase runs as a visible task on a Kanban board with parent-child links, so at any moment you can see what is running, what is blocked, and what it is waiting for. The one mandatory human gate sits after planning and before drafting, where a correction is still cheap.
- Base information — source material is placed in the book's working directory and inventoried. There is no required file count or format; thin coverage is reported as an editorial question, not a failure.
- Planning — a Book Bible and per-chapter prompts are written, each chapter naming the exact sources it may draw on. The pipeline then blocks for human approval. Nothing is drafted until you approve or correct the plan.
- Drafting — chapters are drafted one at a time from their named sources, each with a note recording what was actually read and used, and each self-reviewed and revised once before the next begins.
- Review and assembly — the full manuscript is reviewed for pacing, continuity, and redundancy; then the front and back matter (foreword, introduction, prologue, epilogue, glossary — "logues" in this project's shorthand) is written and everything is stitched together in reading order.
- Manuscript — a single assembled file, formatted to survive conversion into a published format.
The Last Orchard — a small fictional illustration of one step: a loose page of handwritten ideas becoming a structured Book Bible. It is a hand-written illustration, not a run record or a finished book.
Take what is useful. The parts most worth borrowing are the source-discipline rules, the single early approval gate, and the decision to make every phase a visible task rather than a hidden delegation.
This is a personal system shaped around one author's practice and infrastructure. It is not packaged for general installation, and it comes with no support, compatibility, or setup path. Real source material and manuscript output are private work product and are deliberately not published here.
Background on the design decisions: System Notes.
skills/booksmith/ is the system itself — the skill that orchestrates the phases, plus the templates and reference notes it works from. config.example.yaml shows the configuration it expects.